Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
by Michael John Witgen. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 366 pp., $24.00 (paper)
Growing up in the southwestern United States, I often heard stories from my stepfather about people who enriched themselves by stealing from Natives. These were not tales from the past, but ongoing stories taking place on the reservation lands where he was employed and later lived. My stepfather spent much of his career working to preserve land and water rights for tribes and their members, and he spoke to me frequently of the businesspeople, corporations, lawyers, and federal and tribal officials who routinely tried to defraud Native people. Though my stepfather is white, he grew up with extended family who were enrolled members of western tribes, and he became invested from an early age in understanding the bureaucratic machinations that denied people land and money that was rightfully theirs. As a boy I imagined the predatory individuals and entities he described as simple villains, and even as I grew older and began to comprehend the shape and design of their trickery, they remained faceless, the means of their duplicity hidden and incomprehensible.
The institutional lineage of indigenous dispossession is at the center of Michael John Witgen’s , which was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize in history. It is neither a popular history nor a polemic, offering instead a deeply researched look at the ideological and legal foundations of the systems that have despoiled Native nations. Witgen’s subtitle, “Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America,” reveals the scope of his history, which examines the ways, both sweeping and quotidian, that early American settlers, traders, diplomats, and politicians stole and expropriated land. The Native people in Witgen’s account, however, are recognized not for their victimhood, but for their